1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a field instrument management apparatus.
Priority is claimed on Japanese Patent Application No. 2008-52434, filed Mar. 3, 2008, the content of which is incorporated herein by reference.
2. Description of Related Art
As is well-known, various measurement instruments, which are called field instruments on the whole, measure various process values in a plant, and a control apparatus controls all kinds of measurement instruments included in the plant, based on measurement results made by the field instrument. The control apparatus and various measurement instruments are connected by a field bus such as Foundation Fieldbus, Highway Address Remote Transducer (HART: registered trademark), and the like. The control apparatus communicates with the various measurement instruments through the field bus, so as to achieve control of various process instruments.
Maintenance of the field instruments is performed regularly based on the maintenance plan of the plant, or when trouble in a system irregularly occurs or field instruments are added and set. There is a management tool, which is used for maintenance and the like of the field instruments, FieldMate (registered trademark) disclosed in a Non-Patent document, (refer to “FieldMate FIELD DEVICE MANAGEMENT TOOL FOR THE NEW ERA”, Isao Hirooka, Youji Saitou, Mizuo Kawahara, and Hironori Murata, Yokogawa Technical Report English Edition, No. 44, pp. 9-12, 2007). This management tool is installed in a notebook type personal computer (PC), which is connected with the field bus, and the like. The management tool is an application program that enables us to manage settings, adjust various parameters of the field instruments, and perform maintenance of the field instruments.
The conventional management tool described above acquires all instrument information including an instrument address from the all field instruments primarily, and then, operates management processes of each field instrument, when management of the field instruments is performed. Therefore, when the number of the field instruments is large, it takes a long time to acquire the all instrument information, since a communication speed (transmission speed) of the field bus is relatively slow. For this reason, there is a problem in that the management processes can not be promptly performed. For example, when the six field instruments are connected through the Foundation Fieldbus, it takes about 4 minutes to acquire all of the instrument information from all of the field instruments.